BY NOW YOU may have seen the New York Times map of the United States covered with tiny, red arrows pointing to the right, like weathervanes. The map shows the shift in the vote in this year’s presidential election compared to 2020. The sea of red arrows pointing right mark counties where Donald Trump’s share of the vote increased since 2020. The smattering of blue arrows, showing where Vice President Kamala Harris made gains over Joe Biden’s vote four years ago, barely register.
Make no mistake, 2024 was a bad election for Democrats. But it wasn’t as bad as that map, and the accompanying takes, make it out to be. That’s because the 2020 election was an outlier, a high water mark for Democrats that should not be used as a yardstick for future contests. Here in Massachusetts, this year’s results are much more on par, in terms of turnout and outcome, with every other presidential election so far this century. In that way, they represent more of a reversion to the mean than a shift to the right.
Probably the best explanation for the strong Democratic showing in 2020 is the simplest: Trapped at home and frustrated with Trump’s COVID response, Democrats voted in huge numbers, swamping past turnout records. The pandemic was by far the number one issue in 2020 exit polls, far outpacing the economy, and two thirds of Massachusetts voters thought Biden would handle it better. With COVID in the rearview mirror, turnout is back to normal, and voters, as they did the world over, punished the incumbent party for post-pandemic inflation.
The 2020 spike in turnout here in Massachusetts is obvious when comparing it to other presidential elections. The chart of raw vote figures shows this most clearly. The overall trend is a steady increase in total votes, interrupted by a huge spike in Democratic voters in 2020. If any of these elections were being compared to 2020, they would look like a rightward lurch. The red arrows on that national New York Times map are pointing more away from what happened in 2020 than at what happened this year.
Harris won Massachusetts by a 24.5-point margin based on mostly complete but still unofficial counts. That’s down sharply from Joe Biden’s 33.5-point landslide four years ago, but in line with a conventional Democratic margin of victory for a Bay State presidential contest. Indeed, Biden was the only candidate with a margin over 30 points over the last 7 presidential contests.
In many ways, 2024, looks closer to 2016 than 2020. This year saw slightly more total votes than 2016, and so accordingly both candidates received more votes than in 2016 in most towns. It’s the towns where Harris and Trump lost votes that tells the clearest story of what changed this cycle.
Harris lost votes in the state’s biggest cities when compared to 2016. In Boston, she got 15 percent fewer votes than Hillary Clinton did in 2016; in Springfield, 18 percent fewer; in Holyoke, 20 percent. In Fall River, which Donald Trump won outright, she got 20 percent fewer votes than Clinton in 2016. In the Latino-heavy cities of Everett, Chelsea, Revere, and Lynn, she underperformed 2016 by 17 percent to 25 percent.
Harris also underperformed in towns with large college populations. Her vote total was down 28 percent compared to 2016 in Amherst, home to the flagship UMass campus, Amherst College, and Hampshire College. Harris still got 10 times more votes than Trump there, who also lost votes there compared to 2016. Still, the decline in votes for Harris may signal a protest against the Biden administration’s policy on the Israel-Hamas war.
Trump also got more votes in most communities across the state compared to 2016, including in the major cities where Democratic votes declined. Trump’s biggest loss of votes came in Amherst (down 31 percent). Everywhere else he lost votes it was less than 10 percent of his 2016 total, mostly in liberal and well-off suburbs north and west of Boston, including Belmont, Concord, Lexington, Carlisle, Acton, and Melrose. He also saw declines in Provincetown and other towns at the tip of the Cape, and a few towns in Western Massachusetts. All these losses were smaller, both as a percentage and in terms of raw votes, than Harris’s double-digit declines in the cities.
Trump also gained raw votes in many of the cities where Harris lost ground, especially those with sizable Latino populations. The shift of the Latino vote towards Trump began in 2020 and accelerated in 2024, both nationally and here in Massachusetts. Lawrence, the state’s most Latino city, has already received much attention for its shift towards Trump.
Looking at the raw vote totals underscores how dramatic that shift was. In 2024, Trump got 8,447 votes in Lawrence, more than double the 3,535 he got in 2016. Harris, by contrast, won 12,016 votes, down more than 7,000 from Clinton’s total in 2016. To be clear, Harris still won Lawrence, but the drop in her margin of victory, there and in other cities, should be a cause for concern for the state’s Democrats.
To be clear, 2024 was a bad election for Democrats. But just how bad depends on what it’s compared to. Putting aside 2020 as an outlier and looking at 2024 through the lens of 2016 reveals real challenges for Democrats on what has traditionally been their home turf: big cities with racially diverse populations. That’s plenty for Democrats to focus on as they figure out how to adjust to a second Trump administration in Washington.
Steve Koczela is president and Rich Parr is senior research director at the MassINC Polling Group.
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